I held off answering this one till I could recall all of what suede and I discussed about it a few years back during the initial development stages.

I still don't recall some of our pro and con arguments.

but it is something we did and will consider ... when the time is right and the infrastructure is in place. creating the ability to seek out these reviews and reviewers is a job. setting up any kind of payment system, either individual or sitewide, is both costly and difficult (potentially). yes, paypal does seem the obvious option but if it's sitewide, the liability aspect of getting paid creates a can of worms. if it's individual paypal buttons, the site goes with no income for it's hosting and access to the feature. far more needs to be done to even begin to think about it and it does NOT line up with our want to keep money out of the mix on AP.org .... which may not always be possible anyway ...

it also begs of the question of who is eligible for giving these reviews, what is the complete criteria and who judges it. simply using a volume of reviews threshold makes no sense cus it'd be easy to go on a campaign to eligibility by doing drive by text reviews over a short time to reach that mark. using the RR alongside it might help but that's subjective in some ways and was never meant to be a elitist tagging ....

and the 48 hour thing? I won't put my name on the line for AP.org claiming I can control that with others time and efforts. even a written contract between reviewers and AP.org would be meaningless when you get right down to it. but if you don't have a time restriction on completion, you run the risk of backlogging and getting a bad rap and rep for being slackers as a site. even if it were just me that weren't able to complete the agreement.

as far as the pricing scheme stebs laid down - obviously it's a suggestion with little explanation so I won't address that at this time.

so, is it possible? yes. now? no. as with a few other ideas that have been good - I want to build the membership before rolling out features. I want us to do one thing well before spreading ourselves thin with other features. it's no good saying you can do something unless you have the numbers to substantiate it's contract.

plus, it doesn't do anything to solve the marketing issues we have. that has been, and will be, our first and in fact, only immediate task to be reckoned with.

tho, I am not discouraging the ideas, only saying why we won't act on it at this time.

Difficult to implement and with no traffic, kind of pointless we understand. And to monetize the easiest way of course is Google Adsense which automatically generates the small ads to the right you see on many web pages. It's free and easy to install, but again, with no traffic there won't be any income because they pay per click.

So for now we can enjoy AP for what it is, kind of a private club for retired songwriters. I always like to tune in to get the "last word"!

ingolee wrote:Difficult to implement and with no traffic, kind of pointless we understand. And to monetize the easiest way of course is Google Adsense which automatically generates the small ads to the right you see on many web pages. It's free and easy to install, but again, with no traffic there won't be any income because they pay per click.

yeah I know ... and to be honest, I dread the day when we have to use the adsense. tho I know we will ... but I hate the idea of mucking up our layout by giving away 1/4 of our page real estate. or using the mystic pop up ads .... but yeah, right now we'd be lucky to generate 30 cents a month with 'em.

So for now we can enjoy AP for what it is, kind of a private club for retired songwriters.

ouch soooo much! actually, we are so much more 'as is' even. remember now, there's more to AP than AR. we do have some relative youth, some new songwriters/performers and some really killer music - some even bordering on relevant!

I always like to tune in to get the "last word"!

yeah, I get that. even thinking of making him an emoticon to save keystrokes. what with him pushing the edge of death with old age and dementia.